Both Galina and Olga’s accounts highlight a widespread sense of initial ambiva-lence or even antipathy toward the new market practices in which they became involved, but a few women expressed no such conflicted feelings. One woman I met in 2007 during her weekly buying trips to Istanbul described her decision to become a trader as a carefully calculated decision, largely tied to the need to find adequate housing. During a short break from her purchasing, Ania insisted on treating me to Turkish coffee, and she readily narrated how she came to be a trader. Until 1993 Ania had worked for ten years as a microbiologist for a research institute in Moscow. She emphasized that when she decided to leave the institute she was fairly established and had been publishing her work in well-regarded journals.
Ania described how in the early 1990s, as many people in Russia were being laid off, her husband quit his job at the microbiology institute and began engag-ing in the shuttle trade to Poland. Ania soon followed in his footsteps, leavengag-ing her job when it became obvious that the institute would not be arranging an apartment for her; the couple had lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her
GENDER, LABOR, AND EMOTION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 73
parents for nearly ten years. By 1994 Ania and her husband had established two stores in Moscow that Ania continued to supply in 2010 by traveling once a week from Moscow to Istanbul, often spending as much as $10,000 on wares in a single trip. She recounted that, despite her success at being a trader, the transition from being an academic was not easy; Ania said she had earned each dollar of her original start-up capital by standing in an open-air market selling her wares day after day, rain or snow.
The decision to leave her academic job was something Ania regretted in some ways and as she explained, “I left the world of ideas for the world of money.” Ania described what she saw as the “slowing down” of human civilization; she equated the onset of a postsocialist, newly capitalist society with a sort of “devolution” of former socialist societies wherein education and learning had become relatively unimportant. In looking back at her decision to change professions in the early 1990s, Ania ruminated: “I’m not sure I would make the same choice again. When I ask myself from a philosophical and moral perspective—not from a market-driven one—this has been a very difficult life. . . . Something had to break down in my consciousness for this business life to work. In fact, for nearly five years my mother was ashamed of me because of my work.”
Ania’s parents were also academics, working in the same institute as she had, and Ania explained that her parents differed in their views on her new profession.
Ania’s mother was ashamed that her daughter would leave an academic life for one that had so much stigma attached to it, but she did agree to look after Ania’s son during the regular trips Ania made to Istanbul. Like Galina, Ania sought out emotional support from her mother to smooth the regular operation of her business; neither of the traders’ husbands was willing to take on the household work around caring for an elementary school-age child in their wives’ absence.
As Ania explained, without these care arrangements, her husband would never have agreed to her absence for days at a time each month.
Ania’s mother only gradually changed her mind about her daughter’s new profession as she saw how much better Ania could provide for the household through her business. Ania said that she herself had not felt any sense of shame when she began the shuttle trade. As she explained, “Money changes people, not [new types of] labor [ trud ].” Responding to my comment that a number of my consultants recounted feeling ashamed about entering the sphere of trade, Ania scoffed and then added,
They were probably not entirely telling the truth; everyone likes money.
Or else, maybe it is a matter of age, after all, my mom was also anxious about this business; . . . not everyone relates to money in the same way.
When the iron curtain went up people scrambled to come here to buy
up goods . . . and it changed people. . . . Everyone thought the good life had arrived; you could bring in just about anything [to Russia] and sell it without taxation. Everyone fed at the trough [ obzhirali ].
Ania’s reflections suggest that the early 1990s was a time of major ideational dis-juncture for many, but particularly for people involved in entrepreneurship. Her comments also emphasize the “emotional labor” that is particular to capitalism, wherein “invisible” labor goes into the relations performed in work settings and prospects of financial gain can change how people interact (Hochschild 1983).
Unlike Olga and Galina, Ania did not express any memory of her own shame about her enterprise; she presented herself as having a no-nonsense, hard-headed approach to her work. One might link this difference to the fact that Ania’s busi-ness, primarily as a wholesaler of men’s clothes manufactured in Turkey, was on a decidedly different scale from Galina’s work as a vendor in an open-air market or Olga’s boutique in a new mall. Ania’s level of education, however, also sets her apart. Her investment in the Soviet project was not the same as that of the aver-age Soviet citizen, and one could argue that as an academic she entered the realm of trade from a position that was more critical of the Soviet project.
Like many of the Russian intelligentsia Alexei Yurchak (2003) writes about, Ania was able to leverage her social capital to successfully navigate through the tumultuous end of the Soviet Union. Especially in contrast to Galina, Ania’s material circumstances improved significantly in the ten years after the end of the Soviet Union, and this prosperity very likely overshadowed feelings of nostalgia she might have had for socialism. Still, like the other two women, Ania reflected on the fundamental changes she experienced in her sense of self in the newly cap-italist Russia. In speaking of the “breakdown of consciousness” she underwent in entering the world of trade, Ania signals how socialist structures of thought shaped her inner world in the past, and how becoming a trader required a type of emotion work.
In many ways Olga, Galina, and Ania share a common sphere of experience, even an emerging consciousness of sorts. Their concerns, desires, and aspirations intersect in significant ways. They continue to share a sense of place, including sometimes a sense that they were betrayed by a system that they paid into. All three of these women and their professions as traders are linked to a global econ-omy, primarily through Turkish-produced apparel which they sell to Russian-speaking populations with a history inflected by Soviet state ideologies. Finally, as post-Soviet women in their forties at the time we met, all of them had their sense of self as workers and members of society shaped by a Soviet legacy; they are very much members of what Alexei Yurchak has called “the last Soviet genera-tion” (2003, 486). This last Soviet generation is also the first newly transnational
GENDER, LABOR, AND EMOTION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 75
generation of people on the move out of the former Soviet Union, and the first doing the emotion work in public and domestic spaces that is required to navi-gate their households’ integration into a global economy.
Affective labor may be a key aspect of contemporary global capitalism, but it is not just managed by political or cultural formations; people like Ania or Olga or Galina also actively make decisions about how much to invest in it. The
“managed emotions” of capitalism (or state socialism) are part of specific hege-monic projects, and people have variable degrees of desire to embrace or resist these, or simply ignore them. In paying attention to these emotions we can denat-uralize any sort of “transition” or natural progression from socialist to capitalist forms of society and, instead, we can see continuities, frictions, and interconnec-tions. Pointing to the role of emotion and affective states in Russian entrepre-neurs’ experiences of becoming traders destabilizes some commonsense ideas of capitalism as a liberating force in the region or socialism as simply oppressive, but most important, it creates openings for better understanding how gender, intimacy, and new forms of mobility come together in this area of Eurasia.
76